Roger-Maurice Bonnet - Böcker

This full color book provides a quantitative view of our civilization over the next 100,000 years. The authors present the dangers and stress the importance of taking decisions in the 21st century to ensure the long-term survival of people on Earth.

ESA’s Venus Express Mission has monitored Venus since April 2006, and scientists worldwide have used mathematical models to investigate its atmosphere and model its circulation. This book summarizes recent work to explore and understand the climate of the planet through a research program under the auspices of the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland. Some of the unique elements that are discussed are the anomalies with Venus’ surface temperature (the huge greenhouse effect causes the surface to rise to 460°C, without which would plummet as low as -40°C), its unusual lack of solar radiation (despite being closer to the Sun, Venus receives less solar radiation than Earth due to its dense cloud cover reflecting 76% back) and the juxtaposition of its atmosphere and planetary rotation (wind speeds can climb up to 200 m/s, much faster than Venus’ sidereal day of 243 Earth-days).

This book is the result of a working group sponsored by ISSI in Bern, which was initially created to study possible ways to calibrate a Far Ultraviolet (FUV) instrument after launch. In most cases, ultraviolet instruments are well calibrated on the ground, but unfortunately, optics and detectors in the FUV are very sensitive to contaminants and it is very challenging to prevent contamination before and during the test and launch sequences of a space mission. Therefore, ground calibrations need to be confirmed after launch and it is necessary to keep track of the temporal evolution of the sensitivity of the instrument during the mission. The studies presented here cover various fields of FUV spectroscopy, including a catalog of stellar spectra, datasets of Moon Irradiance, observations of comets and measurements of the interplanetary background. Detailed modelling of the interplanetary background is presented as well. This work also includes comparisons of older datasets with current ones.  This raises the question of the consistency of the existing datasets. Previous experiments have been calibrated independently and comparison of the datasets may lead to inconsistencies. The authors have tried to check that possibility in the datasets and when relevant suggest a correction factor for the corresponding data.

ESA’s Venus Express Mission has monitored Venus since April 2006, and scientists worldwide have used mathematical models to investigate its atmosphere and model its circulation. This book summarizes recent work to explore and understand the climate of the planet through a research program under the auspices of the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland. Some of the unique elements that are discussed are the anomalies with Venus’ surface temperature (the huge greenhouse effect causes the surface to rise to 460°C, without which would plummet as low as -40°C), its unusual lack of solar radiation (despite being closer to the Sun, Venus receives less solar radiation than Earth due to its dense cloud cover reflecting 76% back) and the juxtaposition of its atmosphere and planetary rotation (wind speeds can climb up to 200 m/s, much faster than Venus’ sidereal day of 243 Earth-days).

This book is the result of a working group sponsored by ISSI in Bern, which was initially created to study possible ways to calibrate a Far Ultraviolet (FUV) instrument after launch.

The space surrounding our planet is full of opportunities and resources. Ranging from a hundred to a few thousand kilometers around Earth, our space-neighborhood offers an excellent vantage point to the universe, and a great opportunity to push the frontiers of science and knowledge. Manned missions advance research on human biology, health, and life in microgravity conditions. Satellite technologies gather essential data to better understand and manage our home planet by monitoring Earth’s environmental changes. Extraordinary developments in telecommunications and navigation are now indispensable to everyday life, and we cannot underestimate the emerging industry of space-tourism or the boom in projects to explore more distant planets such as Mars.But space also means risk. What is the real threat of meteorites? How much debris — from old rocket stages to mere flakes of paint — has been left there since space exploration began? How serious is this problem today? What is the risk of solar flares and particle bursts? How does our own Sun influence our climate? And what about the danger of cosmic radiation for humans and devices stationed beyond our atmosphere? By tackling a wide range of topics, this book aims to give a comprehensive overview of the opportunities and hazards in our immediate space environment. It also exposes the challenges that governments, space agencies, private companies, and human communities have to face in order to manage space together to create long-term and safe access to it, while protecting life on Earth.

This work got its start by trying to answer the question "how do you evaluate the scientific performance of the ESA's Science Programme missions?" For many years, the decision makers responsible for the content of the ESA Science Programme have been provided with information for each mission including, but not limited to, the number of publications published, the number of publications that are highly cited, the total number of citations used, various statistical metrics and the number of unique author names. However, this reporting only provides snapshots of these missions and was not widely distributed.In this book, we report on a systematic study of these metrics and their evolution with time to provide insights into mission successes and the communities exploiting the data provided by the Science Programme’s missions. In addition, we examine the outcomes of the announcements of observing opportunities for ESA’s observatory missions, INTEGRAL, Herschel and XMM-Newton to provide insights into the evolutions of the user communities with time, location and gender.Finally, we examine the provision of payload elements for ESA’s Science Programme missions. We use the number of payload investigators to give insights into the levels of contribution and exploitation of the different ESA Member States.This book is open access under a CC BY license.

This book describes prominent technological achievements within a very successful space science mission: the Herschel space observatory. Focusing on the various processes of innovation it offers an analysis and discussion of the social, technological and scientific context of the mission that paved the way to its development. It addresses the key question raised by these processes in our modern society, i.e.: how knowledge management of innovation set the conditions for inventing the future? In that respect the book is based on a transdisciplinary analysis of the programmatic complexity of Herschel, with inputs from space scientists, managers, philosophers, and engineers. This book is addressed to decision makers, not only in space science, but also in other industries and sciences using or building large machines. It is also addressed to space engineers and scientists as well as students in science and management.

This book describes prominent technological achievements within a very successful space science mission: the Herschel space observatory.

This book provides a comprehensive presentation of Earth’s energy flows and their consequences for the climate. The Earth’s climate as well as planetary climates in general, are broadly controlled by three fundamental parameters: the solar irradiance, the planetary albedo and the planetary emissivity. Space measurements indicate that these three quantities are remarkably stable. A minor decrease in planetary emissivity is consistent with theoretical calculations. This is due to the ongoing increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases making the atmosphere more opaque to long wave terrestrial radiation. As a consequence radiation processes are slightly out of balance as less heat is leaving the Earth in the form of thermal radiation than the incoming amount of heat from the sun. Present space-based systems cannot yet satisfactorily measure this imbalance, but the effect can be inferred from the measurements of the increase of heat in the oceans. Minor amounts of heat are also used to melt ice and to warm the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth.  The book brings to fore the complexity of feedback processes of the Earth’s climate system and in particular the way clouds and aerosols affect the energy balance both directly and indirectly through feed-back loops driven by the dynamics of atmospheric, ocean and land surface processes. The book highlights recent scientific progress as well as remaining challenges. Previously published in Surveys in Geophysics, Volume 33, Nos. 3-4, 2012